Cztery noce z Anna

Poland

Synopsis

FOUR NIGHTS WITH ANNA explores the amour fou of a crematory worker. Leon falls in love with a nurse and obsessively tries to get close to her. He ends up drugging her with sleeping pills and sneaking into her room through the window. He spends long hours by the side of the sleeping woman, getting more and more bold with each visit.

Director's Statement

FOUR NIGHTS WITH ANNA is an intimate film. It deals with an intimate, off-centre subject - a man sneaking into a woman's room at night while she's asleep. The stylistic approach to this subject is intimate as well: attention to detail, study of psychological motives lurking behind human behaviour, focus on the simple aspects of everyday existence. Basic, honest, nuanced and spare.
My intent was to render full credibility to a seemingly outlandish story. To explore the rational in what on the surface would appear irrational, or perhaps even psychotic.
The story represents a basic need for contact with another human being, all the more desperate in a society that seems to be building more and more barriers between people. And the courage, sometimes verging on "insanity", required to bring them down. It is an eccentric story, unsettling, yet genuinely romantic. Told with enough distance to allow for irony and humour in the human drama. The tone of the film is nuanced, discrete and without affectation - stark, Polish reality treated with a naturalistic yet poetic approach. The structure is elliptical, with many subtle variations, and favours the suggestive over the explanatory.
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Cast & Crew

Directed by: Jerzy Skolimowski

Written by: Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski

Produced by: Paulo Branco, Jerzy Skolimowski

Cinematography: Adam Sikora

Cast: Kinga Preis (Anna), Artur Steranko (Leon)

Nominations and Awards

  • Feature Film Selection 2008